Hey there and welcome back to Take One, the podcast. That brings you just one

sacred page of Talmud each day. And I say sacred because today's page, Manachot 52,

jumps right in to one of the most curious aspects in all of the Torah and the Talmud.

The red hafer, the red cow who is burned and whose ashes are used for purification,

and the Talmud today asks all kinds of questions about what happens if its ashes

are misused if people just grab them and use them for other purposes than the sacred ones

for which they were meant. This brought to mind precisely because the whole issue with the red cow

is so incredibly mysterious and difficult to understand.

An essay I wrote about 10 years ago about the red hafer and, well, science, which I would like

to share with you.

Here goes.

Would you pay $18 to help produce an immaculate cow?

If so, Jerusalem's Temple Institute, dedicated to doing, quote, all in our limited power

to bring about the building of the Holy Temple in our time, has just the crowdfunding campaign

for you.

Launched earlier this month, this remember, was in 2015, it hopes to raise $125,000 in order to implant the frozen embryos of red

angus cattle, a hearty breed popular everywhere from Australia to the American West, in Israeli

cows, introducing the animals to the holy land in the hope that the herd soon produces an

unblemished red hafer.

Such a creature, a para aduma, plays a significant part in the ancient Jewish ritual of purification.

The Mishnah devotes an entire treatise to the mystical animal,

explaining precisely how it ought to be slaughtered.

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